by John Inman
“No,” Tommy said. “There’s no protection for us outside. We have to stay here.”
Derek watched the two, purposely preventing his eyes from traveling past Tommy to fall even one more time on the blood-splashed body behind him. He had seen enough of Cleeta-Gayle in death. He didn’t need to see her anymore.
Stepping past Tommy, he reached into the room. He lifted the saucer holding the burning candle from the table by the door and carried it back out into the hall. Behind him, as the light from the candle moved away, the room slipped back into darkness, hiding the body in shadow. In the hallway once again, Derek pulled the door closed behind him, sealing the horror inside.
With the candle’s flame illuminating their faces, Derek studied each of the other two in turn. Finally, he rested his eyes on Jamie. “Tommy’s right, I think. We have to stay in the house.”
“And do what?” Jamie asked, fear and growing anger once again rising in his eyes.
“We have to find Oliver,” Tommy quietly answered. “Find him and kill him. Before he kills the three of us.”
The candle flickered between them, and beyond its light, the silent house waited. Slowly all three men turned to face the shadows and whatever awaited them in its depths.
WHILE TOMMY dressed, Jamie and Derek raced downstairs to test the front door. It was still nailed shut. No one could have entered that way.
Without a word between them, Jamie followed Derek across the foyer. One after the other, they ducked through the little trapezoidal door under the stairs.
“The boy who lived,” Jamie muttered to himself.
Derek ignored Jamie’s comment, not that Jamie could much blame him. He held a candle out in front of them to push back the darkness. They were halfway down the rickety basement steps when the candle flame flickered, then blew out entirely. Jamie gasped as darkness fell over them like a quilt. Continuing downward, moving slower now and groping their way through the dark, it was suddenly clear to Jamie, and probably to Derek, that they had found what they were seeking.
The first clue was that cold, damp wind tearing up the stairs from the basement floor. Jamie shuddered and edged closer to Derek to shield himself from it. On the wind, buried in among the ozone and the damp reek of rain-soaked loam and pine, he breathed in once again the meaty stench of death and rot.
“Oh God,” Jamie mumbled, pulling his shirt over his nose.
Derek reached behind him and took a fistful of Jamie’s belt. “Don’t worry,” he murmured. “We’ll be all right.” Then he pointed forward and exclaimed, “There! In the corner!”
Reluctantly, Jamie peered through the shadows to where Derek pointed.
Proceeding cautiously, they left the stairs and stepped onto the basement floor. In the coal bin where the old couple lay side by side, they spotted a square of blue darkness in which shapes were moving. It was like a TV screen showing the storm-tossed trees in the distance, flailing in the wind. Those trees came into sharp contrast a moment later when a streak of lightning illuminated the world outside—and illuminated the world inside as well.
The coal-bin door had been flung wide open! Faintly, they could hear it squeaking in the wind as it rocked back and forth on its ancient hinges.
“But I secured it,” Derek fumed. “I nailed it shut!”
Derek stepped closer, and since he still held tight to Jamie’s belt, Jamie followed. That was okay with Jamie since he had no intention of letting Derek out of his reach anyway.
Casting wary glances in a dozen directions at once, because he didn’t like these shadows at all, Jamie stayed glued to Derek’s side as he was led into the coal bin where the bodies lay. The respect they’d afforded the old couple earlier, when they wrapped them securely and laid them respectfully side by side, seemed like a wasted effort now. They were soaked, lying in inky, foul puddles, the filthy water blackened with coal dust. The blankets they were wrapped in were sodden with rain. Under the relentlessly prodding fingers of the wind, one of the blankets had peeled away from the old man’s torso. He stared up at them now, his horrible, mummy-like face glistening with damp and rot, his cadaverous mouth open, his tongue as black as the dark water beneath his head. That tongue, horrible and bulging, protruded from his lips like the head of a snake.
“Don’t look!” Derek snapped, roughly pushing Jamie back.
He quickly knelt and tucked the sodden blanket once again around the old man’s head in a vain attempt to protect Jamie from the wretched sight, no doubt knowing it was already too late.
“Thank you,” Jamie said, helping Derek to his feet and purposely looking away as Derek had begged him to, even though there was little point. He had seen everything there was to see.
Together they turned to study the coal-bin door, shivering in the wind blasting through it. Hoping to prove he wasn’t totally worthless in survival situations, Jamie reached out and pushed the little door closed. Since the clasp was broken, he had to hold it there, bracing it against the wind.
While Jamie did that, Derek relit the candle.
“Look,” Derek said, pointing. At the edges of the wooden door where Derek had driven the nails to keep it closed, the wood was shattered and splintered.
“Banyon pried it open,” Jamie said, studying the ragged edges.
Derek shook his head. “No. He must have kicked it open from the outside. The wood is old. It wasn’t strong enough to keep him out. The planks just peeled away from the nails.”
Jamie edged closer until his lips were next to Derek’s cheek. His heart pounded against the solid wall of Derek’s chest. With his voice barely a flutter in the darkness, he whispered, “He’s still here, then. Banyon. He’s still inside the house like Tommy said.”
Derek gazed into his eyes in the candlelight. Jamie wondered if he could see in their depths how frightened and how furious he was. Derek spoke evenly, all the while caressing Jamie’s cheek with his hand. “I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”
Jamie spent a precious moment losing himself in Derek’s eyes. Finally he swallowed and stepped away. “We’ll be all right,” he said. “I know we will. It’s three against one, right?”
Offering a weak smile in return, Derek said, “Right.” Derek gazed down at the tiny knife in his hand. Following suit, Jamie stared at the puny little knife in his hand too.
“We need to be better armed,” Derek said, and before Jamie could answer, he crossed the basement to the work area in the corner. The old man who owned the property, presumably the same poor guy who now lay moldering with his wife in the coal bin, must have been handy around the house. He had everything by way of tools that a homeowner could ever want.
In the glow of the candle and the intermittent flashes of lightning that still streaked across the sky every few seconds, Jamie and Derek stood scanning all the crap the old guy had: hammers, hacksaws, a plethora of screwdrivers and wrenches, axes, hoes, posthole diggers propped against the wall, one bigass sledgehammer that looked like it weighed a ton, and in boxes along the floor, rasps and jacks and paintbrushes and awls and countless bins filled with screws and nails and bolts and washers. Even more tools hung on hooks on the wall behind a battered workbench.
Jamie blinked at all the stuff; then he blinked at Derek. Uncertainly, he asked, “So what are we doing, then?”
“We’re arming ourselves,” Derek said.
“We are?”
“Yes.” And without explaining further, Derek grabbed a machete, the blade of which was locked in place between the wall and the back of the workbench. Derek hefted the machete in his hand as if weighing exactly how useful it would be in chopping off a murderer’s fucking head.
Jamie got the picture pretty fast. Scanning the tools himself, he reached out for a clunky gardener’s pick approximately the size of a hammer. Its rusty, fat blade was sharp on one side like a miner’s pick, and flat on the other as if for digging trenches. The pick seemed butch, if Jamie could characterize it as such. And as an extension of his arm, it made him feel bu
tch too. Sort of.
Weapons in hand, they squared off with each other. Jamie hitched up his pants with what he hoped was unwavering purpose. “You ready to go upstairs and kick some butt?” he glowered. He then proceeded to hawk up a ball of phlegm the size of a marble and spit it into the dark, dribbling more on his chin than he got on the floor.
Derek stared at him, mouth agape, then honked out a blast of laughter. Looking apologetic and trying to catch his breath at the same time, he quickly gave up and bent over with his hands on his knees, laughing like a hyena. It took a minute, but he finally managed to pull himself together. “I wish you could have seen yourself,” he gasped. And before he could say anything else, he started laughing again, with happy fat tears rolling down his cheeks and dribbling off his chin.
Jamie glared at him, entirely unamused.
Still chuckling, Derek scooped Jamie into a bone-crushing hug, being careful not to slice off any body parts with his machete as he did.
“Come on, Rambo,” he said, tears still streaming. “Let’s kill this fucker and get your butch ass home.”
Still not entirely appeased, Jamie muttered through clenched teeth, “Yes, let’s.” With his pick dangling at his side like a purse, he followed Derek up the basement stairs.
“Asshole,” he mouthed at the back of Derek’s neck, and Derek started laughing again.
TOMMY EYED Jamie’s gardener’s pick and Derek’s machete. He seemed to find their newfound weaponry fairly amusing. “Well, you guys are certainly armed to the teeth. Anything happen that I should know about?”
Derek stared down at the machete in his hand, then back at Tommy. “No. Just being prudent.”
“Yeah. Prudent.” Jamie scowled, going for butch again. This time Derek decided to let him keep his dignity, so he didn’t laugh.
Tommy did. “Spooky,” he said. “An armed hairdresser.”
“Stylist,” Jamie corrected, taking a swipe through the air with the tool, which caused everybody to jump back out of the way.
When Jamie spoke, Derek was surprised to see his breath billowing out of his mouth like steam escaping a Crock-Pot. Not until that moment did he realize how cold the house had become. Jamie and Tommy seemed to suddenly notice it too. They were standing in the dining room, and they all turned to the fireplace to see that the fire was dying. Alongside the grate, the wood box stood empty.
“We’re running out of firewood,” Tommy said. “I saw a pile of it stacked under an overhang beside the back door. I’ll go get a load.”
“I’ll go with you,” Derek said.
Tommy gave him a sidelong glance with enough sarcasm in it to get his point across. He also pulled a large butcher knife from the back of his belt loop where he had it stowed under the tail of his shirt. “I swiped this from the kitchen,” he said, waving the shiny steel blade around like a Ronin warrior flashing his samurai sword. “I think I’ll be safe enough on my own.”
Jamie looked doubtful. “Well, be careful then. Banyon’s out there somewhere.”
“Gotcha.” Tommy grinned and slipped through the darkened doorway leading out into the foyer like a ghost melting through a wall.
Once they were alone, Derek turned to Jamie to grab his attention. “We have to search the house. You understand that, right? If Banyon’s here, we need to know it.”
Jamie nodded, although he didn’t look too pleased about it. “I know,” he said. Jamie stood trembling in the light of the dying fire. Once again Derek picked up the cartoon clatter of teeth clacking together. Jamie was clearly freezing to death, but being in butch mode he was trying not to let on.
Somehow that made Derek love him all the more.
Derek gave a shudder of his own when he felt a brush of cold air on the back of his neck. Still, he was more concerned with Jamie’s comfort. He reached out and stroked Jamie’s arms, trying to get the blood moving. “You’ve got goose bumps on top of goose bumps,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs and get our coats.”
Jamie wrapped his arms around himself to ward off the cold, like that was going to help. He gave the few embers still burning on the grate a baleful look. “G-good. I’m freezing.”
“We can search the bedrooms while we’re up there.”
Jamie stared off into the shadows. His tongue came out to give his lips a nervous lick. “What do we do if we find him?” he asked quietly.
Derek shot him a wink, which he hoped would be heartening. “Wing it,” he said, holding up his machete with a comic-book leer in his eyes. “Wing it butchly.”
With a little less bravado, Jamie lifted his gardener’s pick and looked at it dolefully. “Shouldn’t we wait for Tommy?”
Derek turned in the direction Tommy had gone. Holding his breath, he listened carefully for any sounds of footsteps or slamming doors. Nothing.
“You’re right,” he said. “We’d better find him and make sure he’s okay.”
Taking Jamie’s hand, he led him from the dining room and along the foyer toward the door at the back of the hall that opened onto the kitchen. Once there, they stopped in the shadows and listened again.
Here the sounds of the storm were much louder, the winds that whipped through the house stronger and colder. It wasn’t hard to figure out why.
The door leading out the back was wide open, swinging idly in the wind. The kitchen floor was already soaked with rain and leaves swept in by the storm.
Jamie and Derek rushed toward the opening and squinted into the downpour. The back steps descended directly from the door to the muddy ground below. There was no porch to speak of.
“Wait here,” Derek hissed, and letting his machete lead the way, he stepped out into the night. He gasped when the wind and rain hit him full force. Out here the air was arctic, whipping through the trees and over the dead lawn before plowing into the house like a Mack truck. It lifted Derek’s shirttail and sprinkled his belly with ice-cold rain that really made him cry out.
“Tommy!” he bellowed into the wind. Before he could yell again, he glanced down and saw a bunch of firewood, soaked now and unburnable, scattered in the mud. Amid the muddy firewood rested Tommy’s butcher knife, its blade flashing silver beneath a sudden stroke of lightning that made Derek stumble back in surprise.
Cowering against the storm, he looked first at the knife and the firewood, then up and down along the side of the house. In the intermediate flashes of lightning, he could see that the backyard was cluttered with branches torn from surrounding trees. An old circular well stood about twenty feet from the house. Before Derek really knew what his own intentions were, he hooked his arm over his face to shield himself from the rain and headed straight for it.
Ignoring Jamie frantically calling to him from the doorway, he reached the well and peered down into the shadowy depths. Knowing it was foolish, he called out Tommy’s name. Then he called again. The only answering cry came from the storm. It roared like a dying beast from every direction at once. If he didn’t know better, he could swear it was laughing at him.
Streaming now with rainwater and damn near freezing to death, he wondered what the hell had possessed him to wander halfway across the yard in the storm. Furious with himself, he whirled and sloshed his way back through the mud toward the house.
Jamie stood waiting for him at the door. “Where’s Tommy?” he cried, grabbing Derek and pulling him into the kitchen to escape the rain.
Derek stood drenched and shivering in Jamie’s arms. “He-he’s not out there,” he stammered. “I found the firewood and his knife lying in the mud.”
Jamie bent to get a more direct line of sight on Derek’s eyes, as if better trying to figure out what he was trying to say.
“You think he’s dead?” he finally asked. “Do you think Banyon killed him?”
“I don’t know, Jamie. But if he’s still out there, he’s not armed anymore. And he’s being awfully quiet.”
They eyed each other morosely.
“So we’re on our own, then,” Jamie whispered. “It’
s just us and him. Banyon. The host of this murderous little soiree.”
Because he didn’t know how to respond, Derek offered a pathetic shrug, which was the best he could come up with on the spur of the moment. Then, suddenly filled with rage, he turned and slammed the back door closed, shutting out the storm.
Jamie pawed at Derek’s dripping shirt. He splayed his fingers over Derek’s chest, as if to comfort himself. But as far as Derek was concerned, reassurance was the one thing he was out of.
He whirled and lifted his head, screaming into the silent house. “Banyon! Enough of this sneaking around shit. Come out and face us like a man.”
He and Jamie froze as, in the shadows, rooms away, somewhere over their head, they heard a faint chuckle.
“That was upstairs!” Jamie gasped, eyes wide. “I think I’m going to faint.”
“Let’s kill him first. Then you can faint.”
Jamie swallowed with an audible gurgle. “Oh. Okay. We’ll do that, then.”
They shared a glance. Derek straightened his shoulders and took a firmer grip on the weapon in his hand. Jamie did the same. His pick. Derek’s machete.
In tandem, sucking in long shuddering breaths, they turned wary eyes skyward. With Jamie still clinging to his shirttail, Derek moved cautiously toward the stairs.
DEREK HAD stripped off his wet shirt because he said he was warmer without it. Clutching the waistband of Derek’s pants instead, Jamie tried not to be distracted by the warm fuzzy rise of Derek’s lovely ass against the back of his fingertips. They were tiptoeing along the foyer toward the stairs. If they weren’t murdered along the way, their first stop would be their room where they would grab their coats before setting off to search the house for a killer.
Jamie gripped the gardener’s pick so tightly his hand was beginning to cramp. If he’d had his druthers, he would have preferred wielding a shotgun. A big one. He was pretty sure Derek felt the same about his stupid machete.